Shape of a Family
by misscam
Summary: Sometimes you can choose your family. Sometimes you can't. But either way, they shape your life - just as you try to shape them.  Nikita/Michael, Alex, Birkhoff


Shape of a Family  
>by misscam<p>

Disclaimer: Not my characters, just my words.

Author's Note: Spoilers throughout season one and up to and including 2x06. I've speculated a little bit about Nikita's childhood here, as well as events when she was in Division, and probably the show will prove me all wrong at some point. Oh well.

II

The first time Nikita creates a fantasy of her family, she is five and sitting outside in the rain, feeling it drench her. It might be wet and cold, but at least in the rain there is silence. No screaming. No hitting. Just her and the rain and the silence in it.

The fantasy is simple. It's been a mistake. She doesn't belong in foster care. She has a mother and a father and they've been looking for her all this time. They've found her. All they ever wanted. All she ever wanted. Now they're going to be a family, they tell her. Nikita's family. Everything is going to be all right. They hug. They take her hand. They lead her home.

Sometimes you can choose your family. Sometimes you can't. But either way, they shape your life – just as you try to shape them.

Nikita is going to learn that eventually, but for now, she merely sits in the rain and wishes.

II

The last time Nikita clings to the fantasy of her family, she is thirteen and everything in her body seems to hurt. It is strange how much pain the mind can process, she thinks absent-mindedly, while another part of her tries to cling to the vision of her parents. Her real parents. Her real family.

It feels hard to hold on to, as if her grip on it now is only that of her fingertips and it's about to slip from her grasp.

This. This is all she has. Her granted family. Her family by someone else's choice. This, bruises and all. It's not right. It's not fair. But it is.

The day after she merely hits back.

II

When they arrest young, troubled, still shot up with drugs Nikita Meers, the police ask about her family.

Nikita says nothing. She wouldn't know what to say.

II

They keep telling her what to do. First it was the prison. Now it is this other prison, Division, who've claimed her for their own. Learn to fight, Nikita. Control your temper, Nikita. Put together a gun in minutes, Nikita. Disarm this bomb, Nikita. Give your life for your country, Nikita, you got nothing else to live for.

Do this. Do that. Not what she can do. Just what to do.

And then Michael walks into her room, sits by her bed while she tells him off in all the foulest words she can, smiling at a few of the creative ones. Not grinning, just a small upturn of his lips that she hasn't noticed being so attractive before.

Then he talks. About all the things she might do, could do, all the difference she can make in Division.

"I am looking at you, Nikita," he tells her, and she believes him.

II

"Division is your family," Amanda says. It's not the first time she's said it. It won't be the last, because Nikita doesn't quite listen.

Nikita thinks a family could be more than an organisation of trained assassins working under a shady joke for a father figure. Nikita thinks a family should be more than just mutual purpose, even if that is a start. Nikita thinks a family she might be able to create outside of Division, even if she takes a tall, dark, far-too-serious but smoking hot part of Division with her.

Nikita thinks and thinks and Amanda always watches her, trying to crawl into her head and find every single thought.

This might be a family. It's certainly dysfunctional enough for it.

II

"An emotionally compromised agent is more dangerous than a jammed gun," Michael tells her. "Check your feelings or check out."

"How is that working for you?" she asks and watches the expressions on his face; she wonders how he can possibly teach any one about emotional detachment when he looks at her like that.

II

She has quite a few fantasies about Michael. About going on missions with him, where he can't help himself and kisses her breathless, clinging to her. About him admitting she is the best shot, and her collecting her prize, his lips pressed against hers. About Percy's desk and her straddling Michael on it, feeling his hands trace the curve of her back as she leans down to kiss him. About no Division at all, just her and Michael and his smile as she walks over him.

About Michael and Nikita, full stop.

II

"You have a good tactical mind," Amanda tells her after one mission. "It is a pity I cannot say the same about your heart."

It is a pity you have none at all, Nikita thinks.

II

She does get her mission with him, away from Division. There is even kissing, and a little clinging, but there the fantasy ends.

Families. They shape you even when you don't have them any longer, she learns. Michael's certainly did. Wife. Child. Lost. And yet still there, framing his life. Shaping it.

Keeping him from having one with her.

For now.

II

Extended cover, Division calls it.

Life, Nikita calls it.

It's hard not to want more, whatever name you put on it.

II

Kill the whole family, Division's orders are.

Nikita was never good at orders. And so the daughter lives. Alexandra Udinov. Alex. Just one, but may be enough.

One member of a family is enough to keep it alive – if wanting to, that is.

II

Daniel isn't Michael. This is good. There can only be one Michael, still looking at her as if he wants her when he's the one to deny himself. Daniel is Daniel, who looks at her without any pain, and smiles at her without catching himself.

That can be enough. That can be love too, just not... Just not Michael. Michael who talks about Division as his family and revenge as his marriage and yet looks at her as if she is life.

Not quite the fantasy, but still something.

Daniel talks of marriage and children and life, and Nikita lets herself listen until she can't hear the other voices in her mind, screaming bloody murder.

II

Division does kill Daniel. Not her, the one who did something wrong. Daniel, the innocent.

It's not right. It's not fair. But it is.

She's going to have to hit back.

II

She thinks for a brief moment about just letting it go. Just settle somewhere Division won't think to find her, track down Alex and let her live there too, have a sort of family of the last two standing from families now gone. (She tries to find her own family first, her real family, but that turns up no leads.)

That could be a sort of existence.

But then she thinks of Percy and all those he will keep forcing into Division's little family, about the revenge Alex could want, the revenge she wants, and about Michael, if Michael could just...

She does find Alex, and neither of them will let it go.

II

Alex is not her daughter.

Nikita still loves her like one.

II

Co-dependent relationship, she calls Michael and herself to his face, and he must know it's true as well as she does. Save each other's life. Stay just inside each other's orbits, like two planets of equal mass pulling at each other. Can't quite let each other go. Can hurt each other all the more because of that.

Bit like a family, that.

II

When you first don't succeed, try again, Nikita's foster mother once told her. It's the sort of thing a mother would say, but Nikita never quite took it to heart. When you first don't succeed, find out why and try it differently, that is more sensible. (That is what she would teach a child.)

The first time she didn't trust Michael; she stopped him to save him when he could have made it.

The second time she trusts Michael; he means to double-cross her but finds himself to be the one betrayed instead. Not by her.

And so, Michael avenges his own family and in doing so finds his other to be no family at all; Division, the lie of Percy that made him, the real killer of his family and for a while replacement for it.

II

At first, it feels almost like a fantasy, Michael walking into her loft and telling her she was right. She's certainly had that fantasy often enough. But fantasies have no substance, merely pictures, and this, this has so much to feel she closes her eyes to the sensations.

Michael's lips are soft against hers, his leather coat is smooth against her one hand, his hair soft but not quite smooth as she runs her other hand through it, his hands seem warm everywhere they touch her even through cloth and it's Michael; _Michael_kissing her as if trying to make up for five years (for himself or for her, she isn't sure – maybe both).

It's Michael and Nikita, years in the making.

II

Nikita could get used to this.

Waking to his fingers making slow patterns on her skin and his smile making it impossible not to smile back. Hearing the noises she can make him do when she finds just the right angle to press herself against him with. Feeling all the ways he can kiss her – tenderly, intently, desperately, savouringly, eagerly and Michael-y, because she can't quite find another word for it. Exploring his body with her hands, a map of skin by skin she intends to become a frequent traveller of. Discovering how their bodies slot together when he's on top, when she's on top, when she's got her back to him in the shower, when he's got her against a pillar, when she has her legs around him and he his arms around her and they both cling, when they fall asleep together and wake up together, their bodies warm from the shared heat.

Oh, she could get so very used to this. That's the danger of it.

II

Like any daughter, Alex grows into her own mind, her own will, her own rebellion. Not doing what Nikita wants. Not doing what Percy or Amanda wants either. Doing what Alex thinks Alex wants; she may yet learn differently.

II

She has to let Alex go. But not Michael. Michael lets go of everything else to follow her instead, leaving Division and his life for so many years, as if she can be all that he needs.

Or at least almost, because the black box comes too.

II

After they've taken the car far enough away from her burning loft, he pulls over and just holds her, and she tells him about Alex. Talks and talks until she chokes, and he presses his lips against her until she's breathing with him and into him, like they're a joint venture now.

She listens to his whispers about what they will do now, right Division's wrong, bring it down and salt the earth so nothing like it will grow again, do good, do just good.

Sometimes righting a wrong means creating new wrongs in the process, she doesn't tell him, merely watches the light in his eyes.

II

Just when she got used to one life – dingy motels, Michael out of suits and openly into her, planning missions with him and not Alex, hardly ever being alone any more – suddenly there is Alex betraying them and then Birkhoff saving them and the family dynamic shifts again.

Michael and Nikita and Birkhoff, the very nerdy brother to both. Amanda and Division and Alex, thinking herself independent when still living at home. And Alex and Nikita at odds, the abyss of different goals between them; family fractured but not yet destroyed.

II

Michael can't quite let things go. He suspects P9 is back and is right, and sets out to make good and save lives and be Michael and she can't find it in herself to be angry with him for going off track from their goal. Not when she always knew he was like that. Not when she loves him for it, even as she fears it a little.

He kisses her fears away at night, whispering her name like a caress in-between,until she takes charge, straddling him to kiss him; his eyelids, his nose, the stubble of his cheek, his jaw, the corner of his mouth and then it's him again, thrusting into her while she arches against the ceiling.

Then it's just them, skin to skin and all fears drowned by everything else they're feeling; the fears resurface easily enough in the morning.

II

Alex is still the rebel. Even to Amanda, letting Michael and Nikita escape. A start, as Michael calls it later. A good sign.

Family bond, Nikita doesn't dare call it, merely hopes.

II

When she tells Michael Cassandra and Max is not his family, she doesn't yet know that one of them is, she just knows she will always be his family, whatever else he might bring into it.

Even a son, as it turns out.

II

In her childhood fantasy of her real parents, her father never quite had a face. He was just a presence, a hand to hold, a vague mould ready to take whatever shape the real thing would have.

She never knew quite what she was missing, just that it was something, and it was enough to fill her with a sort of desperate rage that had no real outlet, except temporary stand-ins she would find.

She might finally learn what she was missing, and maybe it will ease the pain of it. At least then it has a shape, a face, an outlet.

A reality.

II

Michael wants a child.

She sees it in his face when he for a moment thinks she's pregnant, and in the the way he looked at Max in Belarus, and in the way he carefully never talks about it. He's had a child. He knows what it's like. He knows what he is missing.

Maybe the pain of that isn't easier, she thinks, listening to him tell her that if he can't have his family back, at least he can help her get back hers.

Giving her what he doesn't have, but what he can have. What she's in the process of building with him. He will have a family, she will be his family, she will, she will...

She kisses him, and for a moment he goes so still she wonders if he can feel something of her desperation in her kiss. Just a moment, and then his tongue is in her mouth and he's pressing her into the pillows and matching her fervour, the need in him apparent.

II

Percy has a thing for fake families.

She should have known. She really, really should have known.

But she let herself be five again, engage the fantasy, have a father who told her things would turn out for the best and give her an image of her mother, have Michael the boyfriend and Birkhoff the nerdy brother and something like a family life, just surrounded by trained assassins, secret government programs and black boxes of wrongs to right.

She should have known.

She just wanted it to be true too much.

II

In the end, she does tell Michael about Max.

As Michael merely stands there, not speaking, but face so full of emotion he might as well yell, she thinks about being five again; the family she had and the family she wanted. They never matched.

Sometimes you can choose your family. Sometimes you can't. But either way, families shape your life – just as you shape them.

The one you're born into, the one you're born without, the one you're forced into, the one you want, the one you lose, the one you create, the one you fantasize about but can never have, the one you will fight tooth and nail to keep.

Nikita will certainly fight for hers.

FIN


End file.
